It’s easy to see how the abundance of opportunities could overwhelm even savvy marketers. The more you do, the more likely you are to create campaigns that don’t deliver the desired results.

You might even create a few that outright tank.

You’ll need to shut down those campaigns and reign in your efforts before your marketing spend gets out of hand.

Where campaigns can go wrong

Putting together a winning marketing campaign is a challenge — there are a lot of components involved. Getting it to work as part of your overall digital marketing strategy takes even more work.

Small mistakes, oversights, and omissions can dramatically hinder the performance and lead generation of campaigns.

What may have sounded great getting bounced around during ideation can perform miserably once executed.

Check out some of the most common causes of campaigns that go sideways — or that never quite gain enough speed to leave the runway.

Not targeting the right people

Marketers generally know who their customers are.

Or, at least, they think they know who their customers are.

Anyone can develop a buyer persona based on assumptions. However, if those personas aren’t backed up by real data, you run the risk of targeting the wrong people.

You have to know who you’re targeting, the sweet-spot that gets them to convert and whether or not they’re the right customers for your business.

What kind of data do you need?

Customer challenges

Behavior patterns

Goals

Motivational data

Pain points

Demographics — including education, income, and employment — are just as important.

Try to market to the wrong people, or to everyone, and you’ll have a tough time hitting those campaign goals.

Incomplete research

Marketers are a creative bunch.

When we hit on (what we think is) a terrific idea, sometimes we run with it full-tilt.

Unfortunately, that can mean research gets neglected.

Research is a critical part of marketing, from the individual buyer personas to the market research necessary to know whether your campaign message and channels are appropriate.

It’s incredibly easy to miss your mark – and even enrage your audience – when research isn’t completed. Just look at the popular slip McDonald’s made.

The company ran with a #McDStories hashtag on its official Twitter handle.

But if the company took the time to understand its place in the market, it would know that people don’t eat McDonald’s for its fresh and wholesome ingredients. They eat it because it’s convenient and cheap.

Huggies had to pull an ad after stay-at-home dads got upset over the brand’s “dad test” campaign and the way in which it depicted dads as poor caregivers.

According to Adweek, client rep Joey Mooring says the intention was not to poke fun at dads, “but only feature real dads, with their own babies in real-life situations, putting our Huggies diapers and baby wipes to the test. We have learned that our intended message did not come through, and we have made changes.”

Everything you do should be tracked

In the examples above, there’s a variety of metrics that revealed whether or not a campaign was faltering, from brand sentiment to Facebook insights.

Those metrics helped the brands realize their mistakes and move forward with the next step:

Either revise the campaign and revamp the strategy or kill it outright.

When you’ve got a handle on your digital marketing metrics, you can pivot quickly when a campaign is underperforming to shut down what isn’t working while pouring more effort into the campaigns that are crushing it.

Monitor the inbound traffic to individual pages and gauge the effectiveness of individual campaigns. Traffic is also ideal for monitoring the popularity of individual blog posts and topics.

If you’re running inbound campaigns, but not seeing the traffic coming through according to expectations, you can trace the problem back to the source.

Top landing pages

Not seeing the return on your campaigns? Look into where all that traffic is landing.

The top landing pages report shows you which pages are greeting the new people visiting your site.

They’re the first impression.

Take that into account when configuring your digital marketing campaigns, and use this metric to make sure you’re strategically placing information (and routing traffic) appropriately once visitors land on your site.

If content marketing is a large part of your strategy, your top landing pages will show which blogs are pulling the most traffic to your website.

So, if you’re putting a lot of energy into a specific topic, but it’s not grabbing traffic, consider scrubbing it or coming at it from a different angle.

Track these metrics regularly to review the ongoing popularity and effectiveness of your content efforts.

Cost per visitor (CPV) and revenue per visitor (RPV)

These metrics offer broad measurement tools to help you calculate whether a particular marketing channel or campaign is bringing you profit.

If RPV > CPV, then you’re doing something right.

This is a metric you want to track if you’re running PPC campaigns to help you set an appropriate budget and avoid overspending.

RPV can also be an indicator of a change in visitor traffic vs buying intent (dropping conversion rate), or a dip in average order value.

Total conversions

Your total conversions are the sum of all the anonymous conversions that happen across your site from various campaigns.

If conversions are low, marketers have to investigate what element(s) might be responsible.

It’s important to drill down from total conversions when analyzing the data. Low conversions could be caused by any number of issues, like poor user experience.

It’s not necessarily a problem with the individual campaigns you’re running.

Individual conversions

A key metric to monitor within your analytics is the individual conversions that take place. It’s the only way to know if individual components are functioning as designed along each stage of the sales funnel.

By looking at the individual conversions along the funnel, you can easily spot bottlenecks and either make the necessary changes or kill the campaign and refocus your efforts.

Want to know exactly how much it costs you to get a customer to finally open his or her wallet? This is the metric.

While you want to monitor metrics like cost per click to get them lower and keep them there, you have to consider the big picture with CPA.

Imagine that you’re running a PPC campaign with terrifically low costs per click and a ton of traffic.

But you quickly discover that you’ve only gained a handful of customers.

That means you’ve paid through the nose to acquire just a few new customers. That’s a clear indicator that something isn’t right and it’s time to shut it down and make a change to your strategy.

Conclusion

There’s no cut-and-dried point where you’ll have a clear indicator that it’s time to kill a marketing campaign. In many cases, you’ll use the above metrics and others relevant to your campaign to determine a point (based on your KPIs) when a campaign is underperforming.

Once that point is reached, based on the data, you’ll make the ultimate decision to pull the plug or dig in and start revising your campaigns for better results.

What about you? What do you use an indicator that it’s time to shut down a digital marketing campaign?

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About Neil Patel

He is the co-founder of Neil Patel Digital. The Wall Street Journal calls him a top influencer on the web, Forbes says he is one of the top 10 marketers, and Entrepreneur Magazine says he created one of the 100 most brilliant companies. Neil is a New York Times bestselling author and was recognized as a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by President Obama and a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 35 by the United Nations.